Signs of the corporate death spiral #2 - no more free lunches for you

Quick shot for a super-busy day where I am simultaneously juggle attending an event, sorting out numerous technical issues, (I know, no one cares), and trying to keep the content engines humming around here.

Thought it would be time to resurrect my 'Signs of the corporate death spiral' series that has long been dormant. Although I could just write about Yahoo every day and that would cover things.

No, this post is not about Yahoo, but rather another Silicon Valley tech company Dropbox, who you may know from their pretty large data and file storage business. What signal is there that Dropbox may be lurching towards the dreaded death spiral? Check an excerpt from a recent piece on Slashdot:

Not everything is working out at Dropbox, popular cloud storage and sharing service, last valued at $10 billion. Business Insider is reporting a major cost cutting at the San Francisco-based company. As part of it, the publication reports, Dropbox has cancelled its free shuttle in San Francisco, its gym washing service, pushed back dinner time by an hour and curtailed the number of guests to five per month (previously it was unlimited). These cuttings will directly impact Dropbox's profitability. According to a leaked memo, obtained by BI, employee perks alone cost the company at least $25,000 a year for each employee. (Dropbox has nearly 1,500 employees.)

Look, no doubt Dropbox's pretty lavish perks package would be considered incredibly excessive by the average organization. I mean, have you ever worked anywhere that let you bring in five friends each month to the open bar on Fridays? Have you ever even had an open bar at work? And I am not talking about that bottle you think is 'hidden' in your bottom drawer. Everyone knows about that by the way.

But why this benefits/perks cut at Dropbox could potentially be more serious longer term to them than the average organization's occasional need to cut benefits (which can usually be survivable), is that Dropbox exists almost entirely in a world where 'excessive' benefits are not considered excessive at all, rather they are more or less expected components of their Employer Value Proposition.

That's right, I went all EVP on you all. But it is the best, most concise way to describe what I think is going on here and the potential warning signal this kind of a benefit pull back might end up having at Dropbox.

No workplace or employee needs free dry cleaning service at work in order to be considered fairly compensated, and (hopefully), happy with their organization. No one needs this for sure.

But at Dropbox, and maybe 100 other companies in the Valley that are chasing similar pools of workers?

The end of free dry cleaning and posh gym memberships and open bars?

They might move towards the need category a lot faster than you think. For you and your organization? It would be good for you to know what is your version of free dry cleaning before the CFO decides to come down with the cost-cutting axe.

Housecleaning as a perk? It's about reducing decisions

Yesterday at Fistful of Talent in the latest '5 Things You Need to Know This Week' compilation, Holland Dombeck included a link to this piece from Business Insider - 'Evernote Pays For Each Of Its 250 Employees To Have Their Houses Cleaned Twice Per Month', which on the surface reads mostly like another one of those classic and almost cliche, 'Tech company perks that your business would never even consider', kinds of pieces.

I mean, we've all read enough stories about free gourmet meals, onsite car detailing services, anything goes dress codes, and even more out of the ordinary types of perks and benefits that tech companies have been known to create and bestow upon their employees. And for most of us that do not work in one of these small or start-up tech companies, our reaction to these stories is pretty standard - variously choosing from the following:  they won't work in our culture, won't scale to our size, are somehow 'unfair', and since none of our industry or location benchmarks say we have to offer them to be competitive, then we don't have to worry about them. They make for a cute story, (and easy blog fodder), but that's it.

It was with that kind of practiced cynicism I too read the Business Insider piece about Evernote, but digging into the story just a bit deeper, buried in the original New York Times piece that BI essentially summarized, we find this gem of a quote from an Evernote employee, when asked about the 'free housecleaning' perk:

Given that his employer is paying to clean his apartment, (Evernote VP of Marketing), Mr. Sinkov and his girlfriend do not have to quibble about cleanup duties. The value of the perk is greater than the money saved, he said.

“It eliminates a decision I have to make,” Mr. Sinkov said. “It’s just happening and it’s good, and I don’t have to think about it.”

Hmm.

The perk is valuable because it 'eliminates a decision I have to make'.

That sounds familiar, no?  Well it should to regular readers of this blog, as very recently I posted about two separate stories about the importance of reducing (often unnecessary), decision making, as shared by President Obama and the President of the Internet, Mark Zuckerberg.

It's not about the cash value of the perk - I suspect Mr. Sinkov can afford to pay to have his house cleaned - but rather about removing from his day-to-day the need to think about it at all. 

And what we saw in the Obama and Zuckerberg stories continues to resonate - if you want to really, truly, and fully do great work, maybe even your best work, then anything that distracts you too much from that work presents just another little barrier that you need to get over.

And anything, even a simple perk like housecleaning, (or dog walking, or yard work, or time off for voting), can give people on your team just a little bit of help in what for most of us seems like a Monday to Friday mad dash to get everything done.

Think about it - what can you do today to let your teams make just one less decision?